Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday November 15, 2011 @09:35AM
from the it's-never-finished dept.

SharkLaser writes "Minecraft, the most widely known and best selling indie game in the history, is now finished. Minecraft creator Notch tweeted yesterday that Minecraft has gone gold and will be released at the end of the week at the first Minecon, a gathering of Minecraft fans. So far over 4 million people have bought the game, generating over 50 million dollars in revenue. Minecraft has also had a rapid modding community around the game, developing gems like the Millenaire mod, Builders and Tornadoes. Minecraft also brought back the interest in voxel based engines, introducing games like Ace of Spades (build, make tunnels, capture the flag FPS) and Voxatron [note: you might want to turn down your volume for this video]. It also opened up many ways for new indie developers, as Minecraft showed development can be funded solely by making something new and giving out early access to the game for those who are interested in the project. The upcoming Steam-like IndieCity-platform will also employ similar feature where, in addition to normal indie game store, players can look at unfinished projects and choose to support their development."

They've explicitly and repeatedly stated that while the 1.0 release is a major milestone, it's essentially arbitrary, and their development work on the game won't change quantitatively or qualitatively once it passes.

It may be arbitrary, but the users on my server will bug me until I update, which I won't do, because the bukkit team will have to fix all those "arbitrary" bugs. No minecraft release is ever arbitrary.

I feel your pain. My players complain about how long it takes for me to get a Bukkit update, whining about how they are losing interest in the game, the longer it takes. Not that they absolutely must update the second a new version comes out--I specifically tell them not to! But when I offer to switch us (temporarily) to the vanilla server, they freak--they like having warps and such. There's no pleasing some of them. I also refuse to upgrade right away because the.0 version of any Minecraft release is alw

... the gameplay matters. Even if it is simpler then modern games the interactivity (being able to build/destroy) is off the charts since you're able to create/destroy what you want and as you wish. So that patterns never have to be the same, as opposed to modern static worlds of aesthetically pleasing art that are most always the same/w some scripted destruction in the world here and there.

Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game development, if developers weren't so clueless they should have either joined forces or complained to the government about the abuse they take at the hands of publishers.

Noone who matters was ever in doubt that gameplay matters. But if you, as a developer, want to get paid at some point before actually having an early beta available for people to pre-order, you're gonna have to work for someone who already has the money. And if you're working for someone, expect to be asked to do as they say. And if you're the person with the money, hiring a lot of professional developers, you're either *REALLY* confident that your groundbreaking new idea is gonna sell, or you're gonna take the beaten path, and just hope you can beat the established players at their game.

You can't have a bunch of developers join forces, unless they agree which game to make. And if they don't agree, they'd might as well make "someone else's game" for a large company able to pay a decent salary.

In short - billion-dollar developer studios are not big risk-takers. Don't expect this to change, and don't try to make it sound like the government needs to save the oppresed developers from the horror that is established game studios.

Noone who matters was ever in doubt that gameplay matters. But if you, as a developer, want to get paid at some point before actually having an early beta available for people to pre-order, you're gonna have to work for someone who already has the money. And if you're working for someone, expect to be asked to do as they say.

Sorry, too lazy to read TFA in-depth, but isn't the point that Minecraft netted $50M essentially "up front" before this release?

I don't know all the details, but I suspect that the $50 million didn't start rolling in till after the game was substantially feature complete and people were playing the beta. There was a substantial period (I don't know how long, but I can't imagine it was less than several months) where he was working "for free" and had no idea if anyone would give him anything for his work. If you're a kid fresh out of college living with your parents, or in a similar situation you can afford to do that. If you've g

Oh, I'm not bitter. I didn't mean to sound like I was. I'm pretty happy with my choices in life. I was just responding to the idea that Minecraft made money "up front". It did, in a way, in the sense that Notch made money well before the game was "finished". There was still a non-trivial period of time in which he was working and not making any money though. Most people, unless they're just doing the code as a hobby, can't afford to have that period.

I think Minecraft had netted ~$15 million in October 2010, which means they made ~$30+ million in 2011. Prior to May 2010 the game was definitely Alpha, and by July or August 2010 it was what I would call "beta" and actually playable. By January-March 2011 it was in a state most companies would release as gold master. Multiplayer was essentially finished, and players could access the "nether" world without crashing it too badly. What we're getting here in November is sort of "major patch #2" you might see 6

Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum

I'd go back slightly further. Since the introduction of Parappa in 1997, there really haven't been any genre-making games that I remember. Even Katamari Damacy is just the old arcade game Bubbles redone as a 3D platformer.

because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game development

Publishers and marketers hold the keys to actually reaching an audience with your game. There are entire genres where self-publication on PC is not practical, and you need a publisher in order to get your game onto a console.

I'd go back slightly further. Since the introduction of Parappa in 1997, there really haven't been any genre-making games that I remember. Even Katamari Damacy is just the old arcade game Bubbles redone as a 3D platformer.

And by that standard there has NEVER been a movie with an original plot and all of the works of fiction of our lifetimes are just hackish copies of the same stories that existed thousands of years ago.

We're a culture that loves the new and sometimes the innovative. When it really comes down to it, there's not that much that's truly new (at least by your standards for video games!). I don't really like the argument, and it's kind of reductio ad absurdum, but posting on slashdot is basically just a form of email, email is basically the same as a telegraph, a telegraph is basically the same as writing a letter, and writing a letter is basically the same as memorizing a message and telling it to someone else. So were any of these things truly innovative? People have been relaying messages for tens of thousands of years!

Beyond that, I would say video games don't really HAVE to be innovative. Again, by your standards, World of Warcraft was not at all innovative. Very little in Warcraft was new, innovative, or unique (see EQ, UO, MUDS, etc). But it was all done really damn well! Sometimes excellent execution of a well-liked idea/game/plan is good enough!

If Minecraft is proof of anything, it is that gameplay does not matter at all. Minecraft used to have no "gameplay" whatsoever. It is only recently it has gained some fragments of gameplay, and even that is pretty primitive.

There are plenty reasons to like Minecraft, I'm sure, but "gameplay" is not one of them.

Agree here, and I think the tipping point for minecraft was the idea of a game actually being placed in it via survivor mode. That's why I bought it anyway. I had the impression that the 'just build' part of minecraft was around a while but had a smaller following. Once the survivor idea caught on I think is when it exploded.

Unfortunately he hasn't done a good job at making a game out of it yet imho. Some nice forward stepping ideas, and I haven't really looked at mods, but I just haven't picked up the game in a while. Terraria showed me more the kind of game I was looking for, but that got boring for me after time as well, but i definitly spent a lot more time with it since I like smashing through gates.

When I can't survive in an area or get through it to see what is on the other side, it pushes me find out a solution to that problem so I can push forward.

But yeah at the time minecraft just did a perfect mass appeal, it walked right down the middle of the line, being a building/creative tool and having that hint and promise of exploring and finding treasure and monsters, so you were able to scoop up a huge audience and get a pretty big buzz for attention.

I think it failed pretty hard in the 'game' part, but that wasn't really apparent until I had spent 10 bucks and maybe about 3/4 hours in the game and saw everything there was to see. Still hoping that eventually there will be a neat game in there somewhere.

Sure. But the point was: These things have all been added on at a late stage. Minecraft was popular before them. And other games, even the blockbusters the original posters disdained, have far more of them, and they are far more refined.

Sandboxing is fun, but games generally have rules and objectives. Until recently there was a very limited tech tree (now recently improved enchantments and that ender pearl receptacle thing), but nothing too crazy. Generally when describing gameplay to someone else, you should be able to describe the starting circumstances, one or two high points, and the end result. Sim City is a sandbox game with good gameplay; the player has to start a town, grow it, respond to natural disasters and define it as a major

Even something as silly as Nethack has almost infinite replayability, and that's why it's popular. (It doesn't mean that making games replayable will instantly make them hits, but it's certainly a large factor).

I've realised, though, that no matter what games I emulate from my "golden" period of gaming, that I quickly get bored of them and move onto other games, except for a certain handful that you *can* just keep playing over and over again even if you've played them for 20 years on-and-off.

Modern games rely on things like multiplayer options to provide their replayability but that relies on people *wanting* to play it online to the extent that they setup / buy / manage servers / games for it. Multiplayer really was the death of creativity in videogames.

The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money. If someone can only reasonably play a game once or twice before they get bored / stop having fun, then they'll go and buy another - maybe a sequel - instead. It's not directly profitable to make a game replayable. It's a rare instance where a replayable game can just make that amount of money overnight because of people "rewarding" them, effectively, for making such an enjoyable bit of gameplay - few others will enjoy that success even if their game is better AND more replayable.

I judge my Steam purchases by hours of gameplay per pound (about $1.50). Anything over 10 hours per pound is usually pretty good. Some games are in the hundreds of hours per pound. Most half-decent games manage at least 1 hour per pound. Anything below that I consider a loss. So the game has to be either amazing and long (rare - HL2 managed it), or it has to be cheap, or it has to be very replayable.

How many games, when you replay, do you end up doing the same things, talking to the same characters, hitting the same buttons, being "ambushed" at the same points, etc.? (I tired of Magicka very quickly because of that (and because of their stupid save system).

How many have a formula - "press this button, then hide on that platform and shoot until everything's dead" - that, once you work it out, you can follow and be pretty certain of constantly making progress? Even HL2 is guilty of both problems and thus why I've never really replayed it.

But silly things like Minecraft, Nethack (and spin-offs like Dungeons of Dredmor), Elite and a thousand other games are replayable enough that even if you *DID* make it through and complete the game, you could go back for more and it would be different. For HL2 you'd still be subject to the same cutscenes, the same forced route, the same decisions, etc.

It's not just an "open-plan" game like the Grand Theft Autos - you still have to do the same mash of missions in the same time in the same way doing the same things in those even if you have choice of which one to do when - but a replayable game. Replayable games can even be quite repetitive at times, but they don't stop being fun to play because it "feels" different - like you've acclimatised to how the world works but it's still a new world each time with its own challenges.

Big-name games don't have the same replayability that they used to - it's definitely followed the indie genre more than the commercial publishers. Sequel after sequel after sequel don't make something more replayable - it's like the difference between being given three "one night" game rentals, and being given three games. With modern games, you'd hardly notice the difference because you'll never load them again, but with the best games, you'd much rather pay more and own them forever and get to play them as much as you'd like.

As someone who's racked up over 500 hours on Altitude, 100 hours on Dungeons of Dredmor, 1000's of hours on Counterstrike, it's disappointing that most of what make them great is missing from commercial games that people queue outside stores for, see advertised on TV, etc.

The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money.

Because replayability isnt the end-all be-all. One of the best RPG's I ever played (Golden Sun 1&2 for the GBA) has very limited replability, and very limited multiplayer; however the experience was incredible, the visuals were sharp, and the plot brought it all together. Likewise, Zelda games have never had multiplayer (with a very few exceptions, like 4 swords), but have always been about the story, or the gameplay. Replayability in those mostly came from the awesome experience of it, and the solid

Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game

Every few years I hear people talk about how there are no more good games, to which I remark that they must not be looking very hard. If you look around on Steam or at the Humble Bundle's dev's works, you will find that there are a lot of good ones floating around; and even in the major publisher circles there are good games: WoW / TBC, StarCraft 2, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime trilogy, Super Smash brothers, Zelda Windwaker, on and on. I could probably list at least 100 games from the last 10 years that ar

Minecraft looks absolutely amazing with a high-resolution texture pack and proper 3D shader code backing the graphics. However, it would make the game inaccessible to a lot of people.

One of an indie developer's goals is to make their game as accessible as possible. It's already obscure enough (at least initially) as it were. That includes as little DRM as possible (note Minecraft just has an initial login screen that you can forgo for single player and even private multiplayer, not to mention there are no r

Minecraft is proof nobody cares that an ugly Java applet game can use 100% of the resources on a moderately high-end computer. We've come so far in performance and software just keeps getting less efficient.

I don't know man - it sounds like a really efficient and fun way to earn 50 million dollars.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Minecraft community when IDC confirmed that Minecraft market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all games. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Minecraft has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Minecraft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplifie

I tire of so many crappy games that it's nice that what seems to be a pretty nice, funny, and smart guy got this far with an idea he started for fun. I haven't bought it because I don't think it's really my genre, but I'm looking forward to Scrolls.

Notch is a man bursting with ideas, but from what I've seen, he is an atrocious project manager. The number of half-baked ideas and functions still left in the game even at 1.0 (Although as a previous commenter mentioned, this is a very arbitrary number for the game) speaks volumes about the company's attention span when implementing new features. They always seem to get halfway there, and then abandon it for the next lightbulb that lit up.

Of course, the title is praised by both computer game enthusiasts and casual passers-by across the world, and the simple but powerful idea of creativity, survival, and effort/reward are fully realized. But when bedroom coders do impressive mods in their spare time over a weekend, and the devs take months refining trivial bugs, it says to me that there is a world of possibilities missed out due to a very amateur approach to development.

I'm inclined to agree. The limitations of his style of software development are quite apparent. I think Minecraft is a great game with a concept behind it that hasn't been fully exploited yet, and I would agree that there are mods doing things the core game should be doing. Minecraft itself is a catalog of half-baked ideas. The core of the game--exploring, mining, crafting, and building--is very strong. Many of the other elements, however, feel half-finished. Take wolves as an example. You can tame wolves,

The part that I like best about the Minecraft story is that the shambling masses of "me too" handout junkies have no answer to it.

"My concept is the next Minecraft, so give me money" doesn't and can't work as a pitch. If your project is the next Minecraft, funders will be chasing you because you already have a game and players, and you'll be laughing at them because you're already making money, directly, without their intervention.

I hate them. I don't think I've hated an NPC so much in ANY game. It'd be one thing if they only killed me, but the fact that they destroy the things that I built, often irrevocably (because the blocks are destroyed, not merely disassembled) makes them SUCH a threat. Brilliant, and yet I hate them so. It's almost crippling sometimes, to the point where I don't even want to log in and play.

It's faintly amusing to me that despite the supposed innovation and originality benefits of F/OSS, all it ever seems to be able to turn out in the game world is different versions of existing, proprietary games - only this time free of charge. Civilization became FreeCiv, Lemmings became Pingus and now Minecraft becomes Minetest. Hell, even most F/OSS desktop applications and environments are heavily derivative clones of existing ones.

I'm not asking this in a trolling way - where exactly is the innovation here? Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?

I actually just read the Minetest developer's note to "Minecraft fanatics". He actually has the balls to say:

I know a lot of people here are thinking that I am cloning a game, meanly and effortlessly copying what others have done, possibly making some fancy cheap technical improvements or something. [...] You could say all the first person shooters today are clones of Quake. They all look the same and mostly you can do the same things in them. Still everybody thinks they are different games and not clones. Why is it so?

Well the difference is that while Half-Life 2 didn't take Quake's gameplay, plot and look and feel wholesale (while of course sharing similarities in gameplay, what with them both being FPSes), Minetest is a clone of Minecraft, built with the sole aim and intention of being like Minecraft. That's a pretty big difference. There's a marked gap between building on what your predecessors did before and adding stuff, and just taking an existing game and trying to make that.

So Minecraft is transitioning from "Minecraft Beta 1.9" to "Minecraft 1.0".

If it were me, I would have called the milestone release version "Minecraft 2.0 (because our 1.0 is twice as good as your 1.0)".

I believe it's just a bad idea to have multiple overlapping version numbering sequences. It's fine if you want to do it (as Mojang have) with a developer philosophy justification, but the *practical* implication is that you're going to spend the rest of your life explaining to confused customers why Minecraft 1.0 > Minecraft Beta 1.9, and eventually why Minecraft 1.1 Beta > Minecraft Beta 1.9, etc.

People are going to google for your product, and they're going to find links to "Minecraft 1.0" and "Minecraft Beta 1.9", and which do you think they're going to follow? Chances are a substantial portion of your customer base will install version 1.0, and then find Beta 1.9 out there along with instructions for how to download and install it (which will work over the 1.0 version returning it back to a pre-1.0 beta).

There's a reason why large airports have a LOT of signs telling you exactly where to go. Remove even one and all the tourists are going to get just a little bit more confused and some will end up in the wrong place and clog up traffic and have to go around the airport loop again increasing traffic volume etc. When you have the sort of traffic a major airport does, then every little bit that you can reduce confusion will pay back appreciably.

Doing everything you can to avoid confusing customers for any product (especially one with millions of customers) is also worthwhile, even when it requires you to do things like spell out the blindingly obvious, because otherwise they're going to phone you, and email you, and tweet at you, and gripe about you on forums, and generally consume bandwidth that you would much rather put to other purposes.

Which is good because those servers have gone down quite a few times. It's to the point that I turned off account validation permanently on my server because I was sick of having to turn it on and off all the time when those servers went down.

But hey, at least we HAVE that option. It's actually quite nice. Not to mention you don't really need any of that to play single.:p

The only problem with their system is if you can't authenticate your copy of Minecraft you can't play on any servers. I have a local server that my wife, sisters, brothers and I play on. We all have paid for copies of the game, but when the authentication server goes down none of us can "legitimately" log on to my local server. Sure we can still play in single player mode which is better than nothing, but it's still a pain and is a reason we all have cracked copies of a game we each paid for.

Originally I required authentication on purpose and didn't bother configuring the vanilla minecraft server. Mainly because I wanted to be sure my siblings actually bought a copy and didn't just pirate it. My oldest younger brother is pretty bad for pirating games and normally doesn't buy anything, which I don't agree with. My youngest brother, who's in his last year of university, also pirates games, but I know for a fact he buys anything he thinks isn't a waste of money. Which I'm ok with because his eight

That's still true with the latest version of Steam. If Steam cannot get online, you cannot move it to offline. I struggled with this very problem just last week: I was on a laptop away from any open wi-fi access points, wanted to demo Sanctum (a wonderful game, btw) to a friend, and couldn't launch Steam. One can play in offline mode only if you have the foresight to set yourself as offline while being online.

Because both Steam and Minecraft have a "play offline" button. Does Minecraft's "play offline" button work noticeably differently to how cos(0) described Steam's?

Well, there is the fact that Minecraft's button actually works every time. Steam's offline mode button sometimes works for me but I find that more often than not it just results in the "Error - cannot connect to Steam" message.

I'm not onto Mincraft yet either although curious what all the buzz is about.

I hate Steam- they still haven't let ME know that they got hacked and my data has been stolen- if it wern't for Slashdot I still wouldn't know.

Irresponsible company and I hate how they're taking over so when I buy games in a store thinking it will save me from having to use steam they STILL expect me to log onto steam before I can use the game.

From now on I'm going to be more carefull and won't buy anything that requires me to use

Maybe your notification email isn't up to date, or it got put in spam or something. I got an email from Steam the day after the story appeared here. It was the same text that was on the forum page and the news page when Steam loads up.

I doubt they sent those emails to everyone. I certainly haven't received one. They may have put everyone in a big queue and trickled mails out to avoid getting blacklisted by spam filters or something, and you were near the top of the list. Or something happened and people got skipped or something.

you have to already be online in order to set the client into offline mode

This is incorrect. Disabling (or unplugging) the network connection will allow the user to set offline while launching steam. Had to do this to play something when their servers were on the fritz a few weeks ago.

My simplistic understanding of "voxel" is that it is a 3D version of the 2D "pixel".

You can render them, represent them, store them, compress them, do whatever you want with them, but at the end of the day a voxel is just a conceptual volume of a discrete cube of space in a Cartesian coordinate system.

It depends on what you mean by "voxel" and that's pretty shaky. While voxel means "volumetric pixel" which implies that it's a rendering element, it's not really analogous to a pixel (there's a layer of transformations between voxel and screen) and even in technical papers it's often used to refer to the component parts of a volumetric representation of a some property that varies through space, rather than the technique used to visualise that property.

While voxel means "volumetric pixel" which implies that it's a rendering element, it's not really analogous to a pixel

I'd consider voxels more analogous to texels in a texture map. The earliest commercial applications of voxel rendering used heightmaps, which can be thought of as voxel maps that are run-length encoded along the height axis. Those are almost exactly the same in practice as modern displacement maps.

it's not really analogous to a pixel (there's a layer of transformations between voxel and screen)

Actually it is. The thing that is often forgot is that pixels also get quite a bit of transformation when going to the screen, they might get scaled, blurred, blended, gamma-corrected and otherwise changed before they appear on the screen. Furthermore, image formats like JPEG don't store real pixels either, they store something that can be unpacked to pixels, but not perfectly some pixels will get changes along the way. A pixel isn't even necessarily a square on the screen, as most scaling algorithm will ha

Strictly speaking, you are right, Minecraft is not in any way a voxel-based game. It uses conventional 3D graphics techniques to do what it does, which means polygons, texture mapping, vertex shaders, etc.

Making it a true voxel-based game would mean writing a graphics engine from scratch, most likely, and I can see why Notch wouldn't have wanted to do that.:)

I used to run a site that integrated multiple different theme servers and a central ebay-like store where you could buy/sell materials gained in each server. Gold was the standard of currency. It was a lot of fun. I ran out of money, so the site remains but the servers are offline. Check it out, maybe I'll revive it: http://www.mineverse.com/ [mineverse.com]